The Time Ships (15 page)

I
wrapped my hand around that thin forearm and prised it from my neck. A hairy body lay sprawled across the nickel and brass beside me – a thin, goggled face was close to mine – the sweet, foetid smell of Morlock was powerful!

‘
Nebogipfel
.’

His voice was small and shallow, and his chest seemed to be pumping. Was he afraid? ‘So you have escaped. And so easily –’

He looked like a doll of rags and horse-hair, clinging as he was to my machine. He was a reminder of that nightmarish world which I had escaped – I could have thrown him off in a moment, I am sure – and yet, I stayed my hand.

‘Perhaps you Morlocks underestimated my capacity for action,’ I snapped at him. ‘But you – you
suspected
, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. Just in that last second … I have become adept, I think, at interpreting the unconscious language of your body. I realized you were planning to operate the machine – I had just time to reach you, before …

‘Do you think we could straighten up?’ he whispered. ‘I am in some discomfort, and I fear falling off the machine.’

He looked at me as I considered this proposition. I felt that there was a decision I had to make, of sorts;
was I to accept him as a fellow passenger on the machine – or not?

But I would scarce throw him off; I knew myself well enough for that!

‘Oh, very well.’

And so we two Chronic Argonauts executed an extraordinary ballet, there amid the tangle of my machine. I kept a grip of Nebogipfel’s arm – to save him from falling, and to ensure that he did not try to reach the controls of the machine – and twisted my way around until I was sitting upright on the saddle. I was not a nimble man even when young, and by the time I had achieved this goal I was panting and irritable. Nebogipfel, meanwhile, lodged himself in a convenient section of the machine’s construction.

‘Why did you follow me, Nebogipfel?’

Nebogipfel stared out at the dark, attenuated landscape of time travel, and would not reply.

Still, I thought I understood. I remembered his curiosity and wonder at my account of futurity, while we shared the inter-planetary capsule. It had been an impulse for the Morlock to climb after me – to discover if time travel was a reality – and an impulse driven by a curiosity descended, like mine, from a monkey’s! I felt obscurely moved by this, and I warmed to Nebogipfel a little. Humanity had changed much in the years that separated us, but here was evidence that curiosity, that relentless drive to
find out
– and the recklessness that came with it – had not died completely!

And then we erupted into light – above my head I saw the dismantling of the Sphere – bare sunlight flooded the machine, and Nebogipfel howled.

I discarded my goggles. The uncovered sun, at first, hung stationary in the sky, but before long it had begun to drift from its fixed position; it arced
across the heavens, more and more rapid, and the flapping of day and night returned to the earth. At last the sun shot across the sky too rapidly to follow, and it became a band of light, and the alternation of day and night was replaced by that uniform, rather cold, pearl-like glow.

So, I saw, the regulation of the earth’s axis and rotation was undone.

The Morlock huddled over himself, his face buried against his chest. He had his goggles on his face, but their protection did not seem to be enough; he seemed to be trying to burrow into the machine’s innards, and his back glowed white in the diluted sunlight.

I could not help but laugh. I remembered how he had failed to warn me when our earth-bound capsule had dropped out of the Sphere and into space: well, here was retribution! ‘Nebogipfel, it is only sunlight.’

Nebogipfel lifted his head. In the increased light, his goggles had blackened to impenetrability; the hair on his face was matted and appeared to be tearstained. The flesh of his body, visible through the hair, glowed a pale white. ‘It is not just my eyes,’ he said. ‘Even in this attenuated state the light is painful for me. When we emerge, into the full glare of the sun …’

‘Sun-burn!’ I exclaimed. After so many generations of darkness, this Morlock would be more vulnerable, even to the feeble sun of England, than would the palest redhead in the Tropics. I pulled off my jacket. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘this should help protect you.’

Nebogipfel pulled the garment around him, huddling under its folds.

‘And besides,’ I said, ‘when I stop the machine, I will ensure we arrive when it is night, so we can find you shelter.’ As I thought about this, I realized that to arrive in the hours of darkness would be a good idea
in any event: a fine sight I should have made, appearing on Richmond Hill with this monster from the future, in the middle of a crowd of gaping promenaders!

The permanent greenery receded from the hillside and we returned to a cycle of seasons. We began our passage back through the Age of Great Buildings which I have described before. Nebogipfel, with the jacket draped over his head, peered out with obvious fascination as bridges and pylons passed over the flickering landscape like mist. As for me, I felt an intense relief that we were approaching my own century.

Suddenly Nebogipfel hissed – it was a queer, catlike sound – and pressed himself closer to the fabric of the machine. He stared ahead, his eyes huge and fixed.

I turned from him, and I realized that the extraordinary optical effects which I had observed during my voyage to the year A.D. 657,208 were again becoming apparent. I had the impression of star-fields, gaudy and crowded, trying to break through the diluted surface of things, all about me … And here, hovering a few yards before the machine, was the Watcher: my impossible companion. Its eyes were fixed on me, and I grabbed at a rail. I stared at that distorted parody of a human face, and those dangling tentacles – and again I was struck by the similarity with the flopping creature I had seen on that remote beach thirty million years hence.

It is an odd thing, but my goggles – which had been so useful in resolving the Morlock darkness – were of no help to me as I studied this creature; I saw it no more clearly than I could with my naked eyes.

I became aware of a low mumbling, like a whimper. It was Nebogipfel, clinging to his place in the machine with every evidence of distress.

‘You’ve no need to be afraid,’ I said, a little clumsily. ‘I told you of my encounter with this creature on my way to your century. It is a strange sight, but it seems to be without harm.’

Through his shuddery whimpering, Nebogipfel said, ‘You do not understand. What we see is
impossible
. Your Watcher apparently has the ability to
cross
the corridors – to traverse between potential versions of History … even to enter the attenuated environs of a travelling Time Machine. It is impossible!’

And then – as easily as it had arisen – the star-glow faded, and my Watcher receded into invisibility, and the machine surged on its way into the past.

At length I said to the Morlock harshly, ‘You must understand this, Nebogipfel: I have no intention of returning to the future, after this last trip.’

He wrapped his long fingers around the machine’s struts. ‘I know I cannot return,’ he said. ‘I knew that even as I hurled myself onto the machine. Even if your intention was to return to the future –’

‘Yes?’

‘By its return through time once more, this machine of yours is bound to force another adjustment of History, in an unpredictable way.’ He turned to me, his eyes huge behind the goggles. ‘Do you understand? My History, my home, is lost – perhaps destroyed. I have already become a refugee in time … Just as you are.’

His words chilled me. Could he be right? Could I be inflicting more damage on the carcass of History with this new expedition, even as I sat here?

My resolve to put all of this right – to put a stop to the Time Machine’s destructiveness – hardened in me!

‘But if you knew all this was so, your recklessness in following me was folly of the first order –’

‘Perhaps.’ His voice was muffled, for he sheltered
his head beneath his arms. ‘But to see such sights as I have already witnessed – to travel in time –
to gather such information
… none of my species has ever had such an opportunity!’

He fell silent, and my sympathy for him grew. I wondered how
I
might have reacted, had I been presented with a single second of opportunity – as the Morlock had!

The chronometric dials continued to wind back, and I saw that we were approaching my own century. The world assembled itself into a more familiar configuration, with the Thames firmly set in its old bank, and bridges I thought I recognized flickering into existence over it.

I pulled the levers over. The sun became visible as a discrete object, flying over our heads like a glowing bullet; and the passage of night was a perceptible flickering. Two of the chronometric dials were already stationary; only thousands of days – a mere few years – remained to be traversed.

I became aware that Richmond Hill had congealed around me, in more or less the form I recognized from my own day. With the obstructing trees reduced to transient transparency by my travel, I took in a good view of the meadows of Petersham and Twickenham, and all dotted about with stands of ancient trees. It was all reassuring and familiar – despite the fact that my velocity through time was still so high that it was impossible to make out people, or deer, or cows, or other denizens of the Hill, meadows or river; and the flickering of night and day bathed the whole scene in an unnatural glow – despite all this, I was nearly home!

I watched my dials as the thousands hand approached its zero – I was home, and it took all my determination not to halt the machine there and then, for my longing to return to my own Year was
strong in the extreme – but I kept the levers pressed over, and watched the dials run on into their negative region.

Around me the Hill flickered through night and day, with here and there a splash of colour as some picnic party stayed on the grass long enough for them to register on my vision. At last, with the dials reading six thousand, five hundred and sixty days
before
my departure, I pressed the levers again.

I brought the Time Machine to rest, in the depths of a cloudy, moonless night. If I had got my calculations right, I had landed in July of 1873. With my Morlock goggles, I saw the slope of the Hill, and the river’s flank, and dew glittering on the grass; and I could see that – although the Morlocks had deposited my machine on an open stretch of hill-side, a half-mile from my house – there was nobody about to witness my arrival. The sounds and scents of my century flooded over me: the sharp tang of wood burning in some grate somewhere, the distant murmur of the Thames, the brush of a breeze through the trees, the naphtha flares of hawkers’ barrows. It was all delicious, and familiar, and welcome!

Nebogipfel stood up cautiously. He had slipped his arms into my jacket sleeves, and now that heavy garment hung from him as if he were a child. ‘Is this 1891?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I have brought us back
further
in time.’ I glanced along the Hill, in the direction of my house. ‘Nebogipfel, in a laboratory up there, a brash young man is embarking on a series of experiments which will lead, ultimately, to the creation of a Time Machine …’

‘You are saying –’

‘That this is the year 1873 – and I anticipate, soon, meeting myself as a young man!’

His goggled, chinless face swivelled towards me in what appeared to be astonishment.

‘Now come, Nebogipfel, and assist me in finding a place of concealment for this contraption.’

I
cannot describe how odd it seemed to me to walk through the night air along the Petersham Road, coming at last to my own house – with a Morlock at my side!

The house was an end terrace, with big bay windows, rather unambitious carvings about the door frame, and a porch with mock-Grecian pillars. At the front there was an area with steps which went down to the basement, railed off by a bit of delicate, black-painted metal-work. The whole effect was really a sort of imitation of the genuinely grand houses on the Green, or in the Terrace at the top of the Hill; but it was a big, roomy, comfortable place which I had bought as a bargain as a younger man, and from which I had had no thoughts of moving away.

I walked past the front door and around towards the rear of the house. At the rear there were balconies, with delicate iron pilasters painted white, giving a view to the west. I could make out the windows of the smoking-room and dining-room, darkened now (it occurred to me that I was not sure what time of the night it was), but I was aware of an odd absence to the rear of the smoking-room. It took me some moments to remember what this represented – an unexpected
absence
of something is so much harder to identify than an incongruous
presence
– it was, in fact, the site of the bathroom which I
would later have built there. Here, in 1873,I was still forced to wash in a hip-bath brought into my bedroom by a servant!

And, in that ill-proportioned conservatory protruding from the rear of the house, there was my laboratory, where – I saw with a thrill of anticipation – a light still burned. Any dinner guests had gone, and the servants had long retired; but still he –
I
– was working on.

I suffered a mixture of emotions I imagine no man has shared before; here was my home, and yet I could lay no claim to it!

I returned to the front door. Nebogipfel was standing a little way into the deserted road; he seemed cautious of approaching the area steps, for the pit into which they descended was quite black, even with the goggles.

‘You don’t need to be fearful,’ I said. ‘It’s quite common to have kitchens and the like underground in houses like this … The steps and railings are sturdy enough.’

Nebogipfel, anonymous behind his goggles, inspected the steps suspiciously. I supposed his caution came from an ignorance of the robustness of nineteenth-century technology – I had forgotten how strange my crude era must seem to him – but, nevertheless, something about his attitude disturbed me.

I was reminded, and it disconcerted me, of an odd fragment of my own childhood. The house where I grew up was large and rambling – impractical, actually – and it had underground passages which ran from the house to the stable block, larder and the like: such passages are a common feature of houses of that age. There were gratings set in the ground at intervals: black-painted, round things, covering shafts which led down to the passages, for ventilation. I recalled, now, my own fear, as a child,
of those enclosed pits in the ground. Perhaps they
had
been simple air-shafts; but what, my childish imagination had prompted me, if some bony Hand came squirming through those wide bars and grabbed my ankle?

It occurred to me now – I think something in Nebogipfel’s cautious stance was triggering all this – that there was something of a similarity between those shafts in the grounds of my childhood, and the sinister wells of the Morlocks … Was
that
why, in the end, I had lashed out so at that Morlock child, in
A.D.
657,208?

I am not a man who enjoys such insights into his own character! Quite unfairly, I snapped at Nebogipfel, ‘Besides, I thought you Morlocks liked the dark!’ And I turned from him and walked up to the front door.

It was all so familiar – and yet disconcertingly
different
. Even at a glance I could see a thousand small changes from my day, eighteen years into the future. There was the sagging lintel I would later have replaced, for instance, and there the vacant site which would hold the arched lamp-holder I would one day install, at the prompting of Mrs Watchets.

I came to realize, anew, what a remarkable business this time travelling was! One might expect the most dramatic changes in a flight across thousands of centuries – and such I had found – but even this little hop, of mere decades, had rendered me an anachronism.

‘What shall I do? Should I wait for you?’

I considered Nebogipfel’s silent presence beside me. Wearing his goggles and with my jacket still drooped about him, he looked comical and alarming in equal measure! ‘I think there is more danger in the situation if you stay outside. What if a policeman were to spot you? – he might think you were some
odd burglar. If you were arrested –’ I was unsure whether the possibilities of a Morlock in a police station of 1873, were alarming or comic! Without his web of Morlock machinery, Nebogipfel was quite defenceless; he had launched himself into History quite as unprepared as I had been on my first jaunt. ‘And what of dogs? Or cats? I wonder what the average Tom of the eighteen-seventies would make of a Morlock. A fine meal, I should think … No, Nebogipfel. All in all, I think it would be safer if you stayed with me.’

‘And the young man you are visiting? What of his reaction?’

I sighed. ‘Well, I have always been blessed by an open and flexible mind. Or so I like to think! … Perhaps I am soon to find out. Besides, your presence might convince me – him – of the veracity of my account.’

And, without allowing myself any further hesitation, I tugged at the bell-pull.

From within the house, I heard doors slamming, an irritable shout: ‘It’s all right, I’ll go!’ – and then footsteps which clattered along the short corridor linking the rest of the house to my laboratory.

‘It’s me,’ I hissed at Nebogipfel. ‘
Him
. It must be late – the servants are abed.’

A key rattled in the lock of the door.

Nebogipfel hissed: ‘Your goggles.’

I snatched the offending anachronisms from my face, and jammed them into my trouser pocket – just as the door swung open.

A young man stood there, his face glowing like a moon in the light of the single candle he carried. His glance over me, in my shirt-sleeves, was cursory; and the inspection he gave Nebogipfel was even more superficial. (So much for the powers of observation I
prized!) ‘What the Devil do you want? It’s after one in the morning, you know.’

I opened my mouth to speak – but my little rehearsed preamble disappeared from my mind.

Thus I confronted myself at the age of twenty-six!